Monday, February 20, 2012

An unhappy pilot

“There’s two level of paranoia: total and insufficient” (Dave Kern, IBM, at a conference in 2006)

As I have mentioned on this blog
earlier, No Fixed Abode (NOFAD) is currently recruiting. For the first
time we are running an open channel (No Fixed Channel) and it’s quite
interesting to see who drops by! One of those
who contacted us there has joined NOFAD a short while later; in the past weekend he has scored more
kills than I usually do in a month (..or two). A good start! There were time zone
issues with a few other potential members, one of which I knew from the blogs and tweetfleet, and another one was referred to
an US TZ corp in our alliance.

An interesting thing happened
last Friday, when our open channel’s member list suddenly listed a pilot
with a negative standing. A guy from a hostile alliance, trying to join
us..? We struck up a conversation, trying
to get an idea of what was going on. He related his tale: he had been a
mercenary or pirate for most of his Eve career,
resulting in a current security standing of -8. His employment history
was very, very long, although for the past year
he’d mostly been in two corps, hopping from one to another and back
again a few times, apparently for deployment reasons. His alliance does a
lot of dirty jobs, deploying all over the cluster to execute contracts,
harassing or griefing here and there. This
often required redeploying on short notice, mandatory operations et
cetera. He had also done his fair share of infiltration and spying,
something he confessed forthright.

But after years of this, he grew
tired of it; having a few young kids and a job is not really compatible
with that kind of lifestyle. Time to settle down, find a group of like
minded guys to talk football and rugby, have
a bit of pvp every now and then with a bit of ratting on the side to
generate the necessary ISK..

The story above came to light in bits and pieces, over the course of the evening. Frankly I didn’t know what to
make of it, but he sounded honest all right. Were we being misled? Is he
doing some intricate social engineering on us? We're a small corp in a sov holding alliance and we're recruiting, so we might be a target for infiltration. Our older GMT pilots liked the guy,
probably because he was so similar to them (football,
rugby, beer, wife, kids..). Googling his pilot name I couldn’t find
much of interest: some innocuous posts on the forums and lots of
killboard entries. He had been largely inactive for about a month or two
prior to contacting us, which was uncommon for him (his killboard stats go back years without interruption) but in line with his story. Someone from alliance leadership informed
us that the negative standing was caused by a few roams his alliance did
through our sov, the previous year; nothing to worry about, really.

Yet, after much deliberation and
discussion, his past turned out to be a showstopper. There were
objections from alliance leadership and from within NOFAD itself, and in
the end we had to decide not to admit him to NOFAD.
A shame, really, as I think he would have fit us quite nicely given his
age group, family situation and TZ. We informed him and he took it
graciously, even though clearly disappointed.

So here we have a pilot with 70+
million skill points, a killboard efficiency of over 90% - and he can’t
find a decent place to stay, as his corp history and security status
deny him entrance to most normal (non mercenary
or non piracy) alliances. I really feel sorry for him.

Which brings me to the 'lessons learned' part: carefully consider what you do with your main pilot, if you're attached to him or her (that happens, especially when that main is your first avatar of sorts).Whenever you decide to become a mercenary, a pirate, make sure
you use a throwaway character for it. Or, be prepared to end up with a
highly skilled, but virtually unusable character in
a few years time.

Come to think of it, when Jenny Twotone
first explained to me, back in 2008, that I shouldn't run too many missions against
Caldari, I didn't really understand of believe her - until I had to repair the bad
standing towards Caldari and Amarr..

In closing, let me say that in my opinion it speaks volumes about the depth of Eve Online, that we're discussing multi year plannings for your character development!

2 comments:

Wow, there are many other corps or alliances that would love to have that player apply to them. Take mentor example, a 93m sp supercap and subcap pilot can fly every pvp subcap ship in the game, started my career with S.A.S have a 97pct efficiency and am in the top 3k on battle clinic. Now I will tell you that first Impressions I get is that I am a PL spy having been kicked from PL due to inactivity last year. But once you conduct the interview you should know who you are dealing with and at least give them a chance. I have been very happy in current Corp and alliance and I am not a PL spy. Other corps who would dismiss a pilot like me would miss out on an excellent pvp player.